In John We Trust

I now have the disappointing distinction of supporting two prominent liars in the course of my life, George Bush and John Edwards. By comparison, Bill Clinton’s response to the investigation of his relationship with Monica Lewinski doesn’t even rate with Reagan’s bad memory. When Bush claimed that Iraq represented a threat to the progress of international peace by WMD development and imminent deployment, I believed that the President of the United States had more at stake than some kind of schoolyard attitude. I was wrong. Perhaps my outrage at the failure of my judgment in that case led me to an excessive desire for retaliation that made me blind to the apparent character (or lack thereof) on the part of John Edwards. Or maybe at that point I just really didn’t care that much. When controversy usually seems to mean increasing the divide between rich and poor, and the military cheerfully obeys illegal orders just to keep the funds flowing, you tend to develop a kind of cynical attitude toward the prospects for performance of government and politicians, despite the necessity for both.

The excessively sordid saga of John Edwards' infidelity, however, has an additional ironic, poignant resonance in the UCF composition program, where one of the textbooks on argument included an essay by Edwards discussing the essential nature of trust and credibility. HOO Rah. There’s a laugh, you would think. The only redemption for Edwards in that discourse may be Hank Lewis’ distinction between morality and ethics, the idea that perhaps you can be professionally ethical without being entirely moral on a personal level. A philandering doctor or real estate agent or convenience store clerk can still perform the functions of the job, maybe even exceptionally well. Why should their behavior off the clock impact professional expectations?

What we expect of professionals is to do the best job they can, regardless of their personal prejudices. Morality is a kind of personal responsibility, a personal prejudice in a sense. However, excusing bad behavior as irrelevant to professional performance assumes a distinction between personal and professional that may not exist. Showing up late and falling asleep, or stealing to finance multiple relationships are common ways that the complexity of the personal can directly affect the professional. At that point, at least, we generally agree and acknowledge by policy and law that the limits of the personal and professional have been exceeded, but what if the relationship is less obvious? Lawyers, for instance, are supposed to be committed to excluding individual morality from performance anyway. Lawyers are supposed to choose the best argument regardless. Why should infidelity and public deception be anything other than what you would expect? A good lawyer being a good lawyer?

The reason is the same reason we don’t allow doctors and fighter pilots to kill runaway children on the weekends as part of the compensation for their value to society. A doctor for whom destruction is personal entertainment would neutralize the value of professional performance to society. Likewise, anyone for whom destruction is personal entertainment neutralizes their value to society, and so we discourage destructive personal behavior regardless. Murder for entertainment on weekends wouldn’t prevent a doctor from treating the flu, but the value of treating the flu pales by comparison, so to speak. We don’t even tolerate a doctor who goes out on weekends and knocks over convenience stores for fun, in spite of how valuable the medical skill may be. There are degrees of destruction, both personal and public, but when the destruction has been sufficient to be acknowledged by everyone involved, then the value of the profession has been neutralized. Call that morality of a sort.

If I didn’t know about Edwards’ infidelity, maybe it wouldn’t matter, but on the other hand, if I don’t know about a crime, does that mean it didn’t happen or it isn’t important? Everybody takes up some space on the planet. That’s the space we agree to allow each other by virtue of the planned or unplanned fact of existence. Connections of family and the routine affairs of subsistence are personal. Services rendered on an impersonal basis are professional, but where personal affairs, personal space, becomes destructive in a comprehensive and acknowledged way, the social value of the professional has been neutralized. John Edwards’ infidelity may not be entirely illegal, but it was destructive on both personal and public levels. As far as I’m concerned, Edwards’ value as an attorney and as a politician has been neutralized, or should have been.

Here’s thinking for you.
Iffy

The Shrill Sillies of Righteousness

Jesus was a socialist. In his outrage at the exploitation of class distinctions, however paternally condescending such outrage may be, there was a fundamental insistence on mutual consideration. Jesus may not want you for a doormat, but he certainly doesn’t want you for a military elitist reactionary. As much as you might like to think Christianity is parochial, colonial, and safe from universal concerns, Jesus had other ideas. The unfortunate down side of Christianity for supremacist interpretations is the Christian part, and there is, by the way, one sin that will not be forgiven regardless of all the love in the heart of Jesus, righteousness. Judgement is God's turf, and God don't take kindly to squatters. So much for theology.

The heart of socialism, shared with humanism before Darwin got hold of it and ripped it out, is the idea that people are fundamentally equal and valuable. Seem familiar? Individual expression is also valuable, but distribution of resources depends on the determination to find places for everybody that fit their individual capacities, not on the mighty power of randomly individual supremacy and survival of the most contentious. Hysterical objections to socialism are based, not on the reality of an economy and society that has already demonstrated the essential nature of interdependence, but on perceptions of a failed communist experiment that established a new aristocracy of party affiliations unequal to confrontation with the established aristocracy of capitalism. In spite of technical expertise formidable enough to at least put a good scare in the capitalist technocracy, the Soviet Union failed to compete toe-to-toe as an industrial capitalist initiative, much as any under-funded and badly organized business venture fails to compete with other established competitors in the market. Soviet communism was only socialist in the sense that it confined the majority of the population to subordinate positions, creating a façade of equality that, like capitalist class distinctions, does not even allow participation in public discussion, much less socialist ideology, Marxist base and superstructure. Therefore, unable to continue support of a non-productive aristocracy and competitively outclassed, Soviet Communism collapsed under its own weight, an outcome previously predicted by a few shrewd analysts, and since Soviet Communism was neither socialist nor competitive, we need to get over fear of Soviet Communism as justification to oppose the suggestions of the President.

The underlying premise of socialism produces such cooperative consequences as public roads, health standards, educational opportunities, legal recourse, and free speech. The ancient and excessive fear of an aggressive and totalitarian aristocracy disguised as communism now justifies opposition to initiatives that are both socially and religiously imperative, and the inference of irrational volume and intensity suggested by characterizations of shrill and silly resistance are about right. If the objection to health care reform depends on resistance to government and the threat of socialism, then my response would be to get your sorry hypocritical parasite butt off the public streets produced by socialist consensus, and find a privately constituted route home, and good luck with that.

Here's thinking for you.
Iffy